…Prince Arthur King of Britaine, 1634.
Presented by Sammy Jay of Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Quarto (183 x 131 mm). Contemporary or near contemporary calf, very expertly recased and rebacked preserving most of the original spine. Custom folding calf folding box.
Sixth edition, the earliest practically obtainable. Malory’s Morte Darthur (the familiar title was accidentally given by its first printer, William Caxton, who mistook the name of its last section for the name of the whole), though in part a translation, is so woven together from a wide variety of sources that it is effectively an original work. Malory called what he wrote The Whole Book of King Arthur and his Noble Knights of the Round Table. As his title implies, he intended to retell in English the entire Arthurian story from authoritative accounts, which for him meant primarily the three major cycles of French Arthurian prose romance, although he knew many other Arthurian stories (including late medieval English alliterative poems) and drew on them for incidents, allusions, and minor characters that give his story additional solidity.
Completed in prison by 1470, the Morte Darthur was first published by Caxton in 1485, reprinted by Wynken de Worde in 1498 and 1529, and by William Copland in 1557 and Thomas East in 1578. This sixth edition is the last of this early sequence and has the language modernized to Jacobean standards: that is, to Early Modern English.
Recent Comments